Business Process and Workflow Management for Design of Electronic Systems - Balancing Flexibility and Control

The application of business process management (BPM) and workflow management (WfM) technologies for design and verification of electronic systems is not straightforward. Flexible, evolving and human-centred process execution is needed to support creative design tasks performed by designers. Rigorous control, and automation of procedures are needed for quality assurance, training, resource management, and for simplifying the use of complex design and verification tools. This paper presents a novel knowledge-based approach for integration of BPM with engineering design processes represented as workflows. The approach combines flexibility and control of business and engineering processes in a customizable manner. It supports also better coordination of distributed design tasks through management procedures expressed as visual models. The solutions presented in the paper are being developed and applied in the MAPPER project, where two SMEs are working together to produce a joint high-speed USB product.